Technical advances and the prolific use of communication, computing, or electronic mobile or fixed devices, such as smart phones, tablet PC's, notebook PC's, and desktop PC's, have placed powerful computers readily in the hands of many people. These powerful devices produce significant amounts of data including sensitive personal, corporate, and government interests. Malware attacks against such computing devices have become pervasive and threaten unauthorized access and use of the sensitive data. Private, corporate, and government entities have a vested interest in protecting sensitive data stored, processed, and transmitted across extensive wire and wireless communication networks. Hence, there is an urgent need for an efficient solution to prevent the unauthorized access and use of sensitive data.
Existing solutions are limited because they focus on isolating all applications from each other, as opposed to isolating the secure applications from everything else. In addition, existing techniques such as writing a new kernel in a secured development environment or virtualizing the kernel and device drivers to run under a hypervisor require device-specific software and a system image unique to each type of device. Furthermore, existing solutions such as anti-virus, spyware scanners, and firewall software and services are susceptible to malware that circumvents them by modifying the underlying platform upon which they execute, and may allow the unauthorized access and use of sensitive data.
This invention provides a solution to protect sensitive data from unauthorized access and use. This invention includes practical data separation techniques that provide granulated control of sensitive data. This solution provides a complete solution against the adverse effects of malware by combining platform integrity with secure data management. This invention provides superior advantages in the marketplace by adding platform integrity through remote attestation across several devices to determine a statistically known-good configuration compared to looking for malware signatures or whitelist of software inventories. The invention enables a corrupted device still in the field to be repaired by sending the corrupted device a known-good configuration derived from the majority group of devices in the field.